The Maris Review, vol 99

Maris Kreizman

07 Apr 2026 — 5 min read

These are just the 15 books that are publishing today for which I have hard copies.

This week's theme is errant children

What I read this week

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe

When you think of "narrative nonfiction," Patrick Radden Keefe is likely the writer whose work comes to mind. His oeuvre is impeccably reported true crime with the pacing of a thriller, with just the right amount of detail to provide context and enhance the action but never too much to distract from it. Readers will often ask me for recommendations for books similar to his bestsellers Say Nothing and Empire of Pain but they're difficult to find, in part because PRK is a particular kind of genius and in part because he's one of the rare journalists who has the time and resources to so thoroughly chase a story.

His new one doesn't disappoint.

London Falling is the story of Zac Brettler, a teenager from an affluent British family who yearns, more than anything, for an ostentatious level of wealth. After a massive deregulation of the London Stock Exchange went down in 1986, England became a chosen place for foreigners to hide money. By the time Zac is coming of age in the 2010s, obscene wealth was everywhere and he desperately wants in. Posing as a Russian oligarch's son – sometimes with the appropriate accent and sometimes without – Zac meets a cast of London's most elite and shady ultra-wealthy scum. He is 19 years old when he jumps to his death from the balcony of a very posh Riverwalk apartment and into the Thames.

Zac's parents, Rachelle and Matthew, are left to wonder how their nice Jewish boy became an incredibly inventive pathological liar with the confidence to convince grown men with fancy cars and sketchy day jobs that he is one of them (a big theme of the book is that becoming rich is more about balls than brains). They're also left to wonder how and why Zac died. Scotland Yard offers only the most cursory answers. And that, my friends, is where PRK steps in...

Another theme here and in PRK's previous book about the Sackler family, about what I call the Jewish American Dream (even if in this instance we're talking about England). Zac's grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, just as the Sackler patriarch was the son of immigrants who fled that area of Russia/Poland where Jews were persecuted. In the face of persecution money is paramount. That first generation did whatever was necessary to stay alive and make a living. Their scarcity mindset makes sense. Then the second generation becomes comfortable. And then the third generation (Zac) distorts that drive and that ambition into something ugly and deranged and even deadly.

"It was three bullshit artists selling air," is how Rochelle ultimately describes her son and his two closest business associates. But her quote could be about just about any of the grifts currently vying for our collective attention, from cryptocurrency and the stock market to AI.

Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

We are officially in the Nancy Lemannaissance. This reissue is being published today by NYRB along with a brand new novel. Meanwhile the 40th anniversary edition of her sole work of nonfiction about Louisiana politics is being published by Hub City Press.

A book like Lives of the Saints is exactly what I want when I pick up an NYRB book: a reissue of a 40ish year-old novel with a distinctive point of view that is written as charmingly and eccentrically as the characters in its pages.

Lives of the Saints begins right in the middle of a big raucous, drunken wedding reception in New Orleans, which is a perfect way to start. Before we can even get our bearings, our narrator, Louise Brown, a recent college grad back home from up East, informs us that everyone at the party is having some sort of mental breakdown or another. Everyone's hysterics seem downright campy: they're screaming and yelling and falling apart, and a guy is passed out with a lampshade over his head.

But there's no time to disambiguate the madness of the other guests because Louise saves her attention for the eccentric and genteel Collier family, especially Claude, the 27 year-old son with the devil may care attitude except that he's clumsy and plagued with nervous habits, or "desperation masked by levity." Still, he is the kind of young Southern gentlemen in a seersucker suit who spouts platitudes and smells of gin who might fascinate a young woman in her early twenties. And his immediate family is very charming even in their dysfunction: they may be crazy but they still dress for dinner every evening! Even Claude's five year-old brother, Saint, is a loveable weirdo who "had the tentative strength of someone just recovering from a nervous breakdown, and this quality was unusual in one so young."

It's all quite funny and silly until it's not. Lemann's prose (the novel is written in short vignettes) can give you whiplash (this is good), switching between the delivery of a punch in the gut followed by an irreverent little joke, punch and joke, punch and joke. Factor in the setting of New Orleans, where everything is steamy and overgrown and all of the characters seem to be sweating all of the time, and what you get is a tragedy disguised as a comedy with everything overripe and approaching spoiled.

ICYMI, I wrote about my publisher, HarperCollins, and their latest foray into using AI

This stinks! The whole thing!

New releases, 4/7

This might be the biggest release day of the year? As always, I love it and hate it, the feeling that many of these books will fall through the cracks. If you leave near an indie bookstore, maybe just go in and check out the new releases table and see if anything strikes your fancy? That's what I'm gonna do.